Who is clicking my emails?!?

[Yifat_Danieli]

So I'm pretty much aware of the spam filter bots already. What they do is clicking all links in the email. For me, they can only be bots once, as I detect and exclude them once it happens (I have a trap link).

However yesterday, I had x5 clicks more than usual in my email campaign and this is AFTER I excluded all bots in the usual way.

I checked Google Analytics and saw that it's not showing that number but a reasonable one (100 not 500). That made me understand that I might have bots clicking my emails that I STILL can't identify their behaviour... We enabled the option to spot bots in Google Analytics and so, if someone reaches the page and stays too short he won't be counted.

If I'm checking the leads log - I can see the click in my email. They don't even click more than one or twice, most of them are only clicking once.

My URL is not spammy, and I've used it for a very long time, so that is also not the issue.

I thought of counting the people who are clicking AND opening my email (as bots don't really counted as open), but that won't be accurate due to the Pixel thing that not every user is using.

So I'm stuck... any idea how to filter those bots out?

[Anonymous]

Are you still seeing this behavior? It sounds like you have a hidden trap link setup that a human wouldn't click but only a bot would. If so, and if you are filtering out to exclude those clicks, it seems that the only way a bot would be working around that is that they don't actually click all the links in the email.

This would be odd behavior indeed though for a bot that is designed to provide spam protection and security.

I'm guessing you've already checked to see if it was a few leads clicking many times that are skewing the results?

[Yifat_Danieli]

Hi Jon - thanks for your answer. Yes, I tried looking for times clicked and

most of the clicks are only once or twice... definately not the usual

behavior.. I agree this is odd.

I noticed they are clicking mostly at the first link they encounter. So

I've created a logo with a link to the homepage and measure my "real"

Call-to-Action only, assuming they haven't clicked my trap as well.

Other than that - I have no clue and Marketo Support said they can't

explain it. But I can clearly see that the numbers in Google Analytics are

much lower.

On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 9:51 PM, Jon Bjornn <marketingnation@marketo.com>

[Anonymous]

We just ran a test of some of this behavior, and while some spam defense systems click all links in an email, the ones we saw most clicked only 1 link, a single time - our main CTA link.

So this is different from what you are seeing. Only the ones that click all links have been clicking on our homepage link in our top logo.

It seems the more sophisticated filters can differentiate between the main CTA link and avoid clicking links in the footer and header of an email. For what it's worth, the only two text links in this email were the CTA and a mailto: link. The others were all linked images so maybe that's why.